Techfoot

Gardner Writes » Blog Archive » Techfoot’s back on the bull’s eye:

Hamilton College Career Center Philosophy Twenty years ago I wrote the first draft of this philosophy statement. Glad to see it’s still there.

I appreciate Gardner’s kind words about my renewed attention to my blog and his comments on missed opportunities for integrating the academic mission with the goals of other units. I was particularly interested in his thoughts on student affairs:

Student experience: that’s the purview of Student Affairs, right? The people who schedule the mixers and dances and res-hall activities? The people who get the pool tables and climbing walls together for student recreation? Yet how many rich, unexplored opportunities are here for creative informal learning encounters, among students and faculty and staff. Instead, we seem to have independent, centrally funded catering operations–credit catering, activity catering, etc. Where’s the academic mission situated within a view of the whole person?

I spent 14 years of my professional life as part of the student affairs “division” at Hamilton. As the director of the Career Center, my community of practice was a pretty diverse group–the priest and chaplains; the clinical psychologists and counselors; the residence life folks; nurse practitioners and “the doctor”; the campus activities staff, the directors of multicultural affairs and service learning, along with the occasional faculty member doing a three year term as “downstairs dean”. We met in (seemingly endless) staff meetings, task forces, study groups, parties, retreats, sporting events, art shows and campus protests, and developed a remarkable sense of shared purpose and passion, even with the diversity of our professional training and experience.

The passion that held us together was the belief that, as Gardner says, the four-year, residential, liberal arts experience provides an unparalleled opportunity for learning in all its richness. We believed deeply in an expansive view of education that included emotional, motivational, spiritual and physical components as well as the cognitive and critical skills and understandings that were the centerpieces of the “academic mission”. While the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of our work were largely invisible to our faculty colleagues, we believed that we were contributing to something more substantial than merely organizing the next Smashing Pumpkins concert.

Early in my tenure at Hamilton, I got a call from the president’s secretary. One of the president’s practices was to schedule one-on-one meetings with new administrators shortly after they were hired. (His other practice was to protect the college from administrative bloat by writing a statement into appointment letters: “I’m sure that someone with your outstanding qualifications and potential will build on your Hamilton experience to move onto more challenging opportunities within five years.”) During the conversation, he asked me what my goals were for the new job.

Even in my short tenure, I was aware of the general distrust by the faculty of such a pristine liberal arts institution for anyone with the obscenely vocational title of Director of the Career Center. “My goal”, I told the president, “is to be as good at doing my job as the very best of your faculty are at doing theirs and to have you recognize and appreciate the contribution that makes to the College. The folks in my office share the same goals as the instructional faculty. We want to help students develop self-knowledge and understanding, learn to make decisions creatively and critically, and apply their writing and oral communication skills to building their own careers and contributing to their communities. Our methods of doing that are different–but they are every bit as complex as what faculty do within their disciplines. For us, the ultimate measure of success won’t be a book or publication in a prestigious journal. The measure of success will be if we can build on the best ideas of the psychologists, sociologists, learning theorists and our colleagues at other universities to help students lay the foundation for lifelong career development. ”

The president looked at me like I was nuts. He said something like, “As long as all the theoretical stuff doesn’t get in the way of building a good on-campus recruiting program, we’ll be just fine. I would really like to see more top-tier investment banks coming to campus though.”

For the rest of my tenure at Hamilton, we tried share the idea that the Career Center program made an important contribution to the developmental learning process and that students would benefit integrating their skills, values, interests and passions into a commitment to lifelong learning–starting with their first job or grad school search. The success of our attempt to communicate that vision could probably be summed up in the words of the tour guide with the most abrasive voice I’ve ever heard in my life. During the last summer I was at Hamilton, the admissions tour went right by my open office window, and five times a day, I had to listen to her holler:

And this is our career center where the recruiters come in the spring and the seniors go to get jobs…

So much for all that theoretical stuff…

I have to hope that our new tools of communication and collaboration can help someday make the various communities on our campuses more open and more transparent. Blogs, wikis, YouTube and the rest might help provide glimpses into communities that otherwise might be invisible to us, and those glimpses may well grow into something more.

Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts - A Neglected Necessity in Liberal Arts Assessment: The Student as the Unit of Analysis

Dan Chambliss, a former colleague of mine at Hamilton, has written a valuable article for the Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts. The article reminds us of the difference between the way that most faculty experience academic life and the way students experience it and suggests some ways that we can incorporate a more systematic understanding of student perception into our planning and assessment models.

As a sociologist, Dan has spent much of his professional life rigorously studying things that many of us know intuitively at some level, but often don’t act upon. Research by sociologists and anthropologists has confirmed that students exist in a culture that often runs parallel to that of faculty and administrators, but that only occasionally intersects.

Students and faculty also approach academic disciplines with different expectations. Faculty, for instance, typically place the psychology department among the natural sciences; most psychologists themselves do, and many fiercely advance a scientific agenda and image for their discipline. But most freshmen (reasonably) expect psychology to explain parental divorce, boyfriend problems, and why roommates fight. When they discover that hypothesis testing often figures more prominently than people, many students drop psychology.

Perhaps the most important point in the article for me, though, was the clear identification of he problem of reasoning from “organizational collectivities”:

the success of individual students doesn’t directly reflect the success of classes, departments, programs, or institutions, since individual experience cannot automatically be inferred from the behavior of collectivities.

With all the emphasis on assessment of student outcomes, most of us still fall back on reasoning from collectivities as a way of judging and publicizing our quality. Individual student learning is a complex interaction of all the academic and nonacademic experiences of a whole human being, and measuring the effectiveness of courses, departments and professors will never give the kind of deep insight into individual learning that would be necessary to allow us to make our universities truly liberating. Most universities have the expertise among the faculty in the social sciences to do this kind of research at a much more sophisticated level.

Even though we have the expertise, few of universities are using it to plan policy, because of the natural limitations of our own humanty. All of tend to focus most directly on the contribution that we make to the institution:

As the paid employees of academic institutions, then, we all concentrate on our formal, institutionalized, organized efforts to help our students. So it’s not surprising that when we try to measure what happens, we measure our own efforts: what buildings are newly opened; what programs are designed and initiated; what’s in the course catalogue; the classes we teach and how many students are in them; even how successful those classes are.

Dan lays out specific guidelines for doing policy research:

1. Start by sampling actual student and looking at their entire transcripts. Even small random samples of transcripts can give “startling” insights into the actual academic lives of your students.
2. Look hard at the academic lives of all your students–not just the award winners. How did the bottom half of the class get there? Does the institution bear any responsibility or is it purely the students’ lack of talent or achievement?
3. “Finally, remember that departmental or program-level assessment, so politically feasible and apparently efficient, may easily be irrelevant to student outcomes.”

Lots to think about here…

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » A Vision of Students Today:

This video was made by a group of Kansas State students as part of a class production known as the Digital Ethnography project. (See this YouTube video for more information about what they are doing and how they are doing it.)

The project wasn’t on my radar until the a recent post from Andy Rush at the University of Mary Washington. We’ve learned a lot from anthropologists who produce works like Coming of Age in New Jersey and My Freshman Year, but this has a kind of power that goes even beyond those texts.

The blog post has a great description of how the video was produced.

This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise… (Read the Rest)

Now that they are in my aggregator, I’m looking forward to following the work of the class and their professor.